The problem isn't that we're not spending enough money on
college; compared to most other countries, the U.S. spends a ton.
It's that the country spends it
in an incredibly inefficient way.

America spends more on higher education, as a percentage of Gross
Domestic Product (GDP), than almost any other nation. As the
world's biggest economy, it spends vastly more in dollar terms
than anyone else. But when you measure how many people actually
end up getting through college, we're more inefficient than
almost every other developed nation,
according to a new report from the Georgetown University
Center on Education and the Workforce.

The inefficiency rating divides the degree attainment rate by
spending, and estimates how many more graduates a country could
expect by spending another percentage point of GDP. The weighted
figure counts four-year graduates more than two-year students:

As for whether we should be making post-secondary education a
priority, the numbers aren't ambiguous there. There might be
things we can improve about college, but there's no denying that
college graduates
do far, far better in the job market and are more likely to
continue to do so: